In a surprise revelation, Samsung’s next flagship handset has been confirmed as the first mobile phone ever to have ray tracing capabilities.
In her keynote address at the Computex conference, AMD CEO Dr Lisa Su (above) announced that the next generation of Samsung’s Exynos processors, used in their flagship phones in the Asia-Pacific region, would be built with AMD’s RDNA 2 architecture.
“AMD has partnered with industry leader Samsung for several years to accelerate graphics innovation in the mobile market, and we’re happy to announce that we will bring custom graphics IP to Samsung’s next flagship mobile SOC, with ray tracing and variable rate shading capabilities.
“We’re really looking forward to Samsung providing more details later this year,” she said.
Image: AMD
Ray tracing is a graphical technique that more accurately plots beams of light in computer-generated images, making for more realistic shadows and reflections, among other improvements. It is currently only found in high-end desktop and notebook graphics cards from AMD and rival Nvidia, so its advent on smartphones will be a big step up for mobile gaming.
As Samsung’s American flagship models usually use Qualcomm Snapdragon chipsets instead of Samsung Exynos, it is as yet unknown whether ray tracing on the S22 will be available in America.
